Toño Ramirez PHIL02: Intro to Philosophy (Morals and Politics)

Welcome!

Introductory philosophy courses are taught in many different ways. Knowing a little about how what a particular version of the course entails can help you to decide if it's the sort of thing you're looking for. This page provides information about how I usually run my PHIL02 course, as well as announcements and materials relevant to students currently taking it.

While philosophy as a broad discipline deals with several subjects, this course restricts its focus to topics surrounding moral inquiry and political principles. In a nutshell, the course considers questions about what it means to live well, about threats to the coherence of moral discourse, and about contemporary moral controversies.

The course employs some texts that are a little less traditional than you might expect to find in a typical introductory course. In addition to texts by authors like Plato and Nietzsche, we look at traditional philosophical puzzles via discussions of contemporary popular culture. It turns out that rigorous philosophical discussions can be generated by considering popular films and music just as easily as they can by restricting focus to canonized texts. Or so I try to show.

Please feel free to have a look at the course syllabus, which is available via the navigation bar on the left of this page. It gives a more detailed description of the course requirements, as well as of the reading schedule we follow. I'd be happy to answer any further questions you might have about the course--just drop me an email.